Masami Sato On The Power Of Giving Strengthening Communities Globally

Masami Sato is a 2-time TEDx speaker, Amazon Best-selling author, winner of Sustainable Business Awards and the founder of a global giving movement B1G1.

Masami was born in Japan but her desire to expand her horizons took her on a global journey. She became deeply concerned about the inequalities and other challenges that existed in the world. Since then, she has endeavoured to create real WIN-WIN connections across all cultures, people and organisations to realise a different world.

She has been a serial entrepreneur since 2001, starting and running several commercial enterprises all aiming to transform the way businesses are operated today. And by taking a completely new look at the power of giving, she founded B1G1 (Buy1GIVE1) in 2007.

Masami discusses B1G1’s mission to foster happiness centred business through innovative philanthropy practices and the experiences which lead to her becoming a serial entrepreneur.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, could you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in the social enterprise sector?

[Masami Sato] - When I first started out, I didn't know a term such as social enterprise. I think it wasn't a business concept that has been around all the time. When I was growing up in Japan, I used to help in my grandparents' family business, so that was kind of my entry point into the world of business. But then I had an opportunity to travel around the world after I finished studying in Japan, and during that period, I had a lot of questions and I was a curious, very shy person. But I was very curious about what was happening in the world.

Actually, there were certain things that didn't make sense to me when I was traveling, because I realised that there are lots of things happening in the world that were unimaginable in my own community or country.

For example, children begging on the street and not going to school, or people with a physical disability not having access to support and healthcare. Whilst I enjoyed travel so much because I was connecting with people and experiencing so many different things in the world, there was this pending question in my mind about what we were all trying to do as human beings. One thing was working hard, and my parents are working really hard in growing the Japanese economy and working harder to climb the corporate ladder, my father was doing that. Even though materialistically our family was starting to get better off with hard work, there seemed to be a lack of a sense of satisfaction, happiness and connection.

When I was traveling in the wild and seeing the real poverty or things that didn't make sense to me, I questioned why are we all trying harder to do something when there were so many problems that we had to solve?

That was the beginning of my journey, and when I became a mother in my 20's, I for the first time thought about doing something other than just wandering and questioning. That's when I started my very first business and I became a business owner, and at that time, about 20 years ago, I started a food company because I loved food and I also believed that food brought people together and connects us.

I wanted to create a successful food company so that I could give healthy eating options to busy working people and families, but at the same time wanted to give the profits away so that I could do something about the street children, and perhaps one day build a soup kitchen so that I could help feed and help educate street children in several countries.

Masami Sato Sustainable Business Award.jpg

That was how I started my first venture, but eventually that took me on the journey as an entrepreneur and business owner, working hard for about five years. One day I stopped and ran into this food production company, distributing food products to many retail stores in Australia back then. I questioned what I was doing, and then I thought "well, I've worked so hard for five years", but then I was not doing anything meaningful because I was always busy, I never had enough time or the business was growing, but we weren't making enough profit to give significantly. That was the moment when I had the idea that instead of trying to do something big, what if we just did something small, which was to give a meal for every meal we sold?

Then we came up with the idea of a buy one, give one model. It's been 14 years since then, and today B1G1 is a global giving initiative working with thousands of businesses and those businesses are making great impacts every day through what they're doing.

Masami, that's a very powerful journey that you've experienced, and that's brought you to establishing B1G1 and it's a global enterprise and it demonstrates what you call the power of giving. For our audience, what does the power of giving mean to you Masami?

Just to clarify why the food business turned into a global giving initiative, I knew many other business owners who cared about lots of different issues.

I realised that if we could make giving really simple, and then if all these businesses practice giving the things that they do every day, then we could actually solve and transform so many issues in the world together because there are so many businesses out there.

Just by looking around you notice that in your house or in your office there are many things and services we use, and these businesses exist and do what they do every day. I realised that giving has been traditionally happening in charitable causes, but then we haven't managed to solve all of our problems and the reason why is because only significant change in the world, life and work can happen through changing a habit rather than doing just one big thing. I realised that there is a power in this model of giving, and then at that time I decided to sell my own food company in Australia and moved to Singapore to start what would be B1G1 as a social enterprise and also a global giving initiative to help many other businesses to exercise this way of giving. Then looking back, even though I was just the one business owner who then started to talk with several other business owners, they resonated with the idea and then they started to give and so many more businesses have joined us in the last 14 years.

Together, those businesses, even though many of them are small businesses, they together collectively have created over 200 million giving impacts in all giving categories, like giving access to water, providing education, providing women micro-loans or giving books to libraries. Because of this I think that the power of giving is undeniable.

Then also if we think about why giving is so powerful, it's because human beings have so much creativity and so much power. [For example] our technology has the power to transform many things, but only when we come with a desire to give, to add value or to solve problems for others. When we have this spirit of giving, we actually have all the power that's required to solve all the problems. That's why I think the power of giving exists in small things and people coming together. If every business and person can align to create a sustainable world together, then there's nothing that's impossible for us to solve.

That's a very interesting foundational concept there for B1G1. It also speaks to your journey and your experiences as a globe trotter, when you travelled quite a lot at the beginning of your career.

What do you believe are the greatest challenges from your experience as a globe trotter, in forging long-lasting bonds between diverse cultures, nations, and societies?

It's a big question, however, it's an important question. I think the answer lies in something small and then somewhere very close to us. Actually, Mother Teresa once said that the problem in this world is that we set our family circles too small. I totally agree with this because when you look at traditional communities or even farming communities, and when I was younger, I learned a lot from farmers because I went to work with them in my traveling days.

It's quite interesting because sustainable connections happen very naturally when we actually see each other as a part of a family unit, because then we will be making decisions, creating harmony, or helping each other in a very natural way without having rigid regulations, but having very smart methods to analyse and create outcomes.

Families exist all the time like this, and we naturally created this harmonious environment. Not all families are always perfect, there are lots of issues in communities as well, but if we think about the simple concept of being a family and then apply that same philosophy or thinking in a global community, I think we can all reflect on that and ask, "why are we doing this?" Maybe we can actually work together in a new way because the truth is that this world can only thrive, last and be sustained when we can take care of each other, and we know this very much because of the pandemic as well.

I love that concept, that's a really beautiful takeaway that you've brought there. As I was just saying Masami, you've had a wonderful journey that's led you to founding B1G1, and if you were going to give advice to an aspiring social entrepreneur coming from humble beginnings, what would it be?

I think the most important learning for me was the power of small and starting with something small but do it now because it's so easy to say, "I'm not ready to do things. I need to be more successful before I can do something." Many people think about delaying what they want to do, and they feel like they're not ready yet.

But if we think that we don't need to do big things immediately, we can start small, then small things can be done right away and every day, and that there is so much power. I think basically reflecting on the power of small and starting something now is one important thing that we could exercise more often.

That's a really good and succinct message Masami.

Before you mentioned that a bunch of organisations you've worked with have begun adopting this power of small, making changes and giving back. Could you tell us about some of these inspiring projects or initiatives that you have come across recently that are creating a positive social change?

There are so many examples in both the business and causes side because we work with businesses and connect them with high impact causes and then that creates an impact. Let me just give you a quick example in both areas. One is business, and there are lots of businesses that joined us along the way. Not all of these businesses were ready to give a lot, only be very successful. That's why it's very special when they also want to give, and one company for example was a lady who was running a fashion business selling small amounts of fashion items at a weekend farmer's market. But she resonated with the B1G1 concepts and decided that she wanted every product that she sold to make a positive impact. She decided that it will go to the education of girls at risk of being trafficked, giving tuition lessons to those girls for every product she sold.

I wouldn't say giving was the only factor to her success, but what happened was that through the giving spirit she had and focused on in her company, she then grew her business. She now has an official outlet and her online fashion business boomed.

Now that she's giving so much more, she said to us that holding that purpose of giving in her business was something that matters the most in her business journey. That has been very inspiring to hear over the year. Another side is the giving side, and in the B1G1 space we have many projects. We have more than 500 carefully selected projects at this stage so that every business could give any amount upwards of 1 cent, but still create that tangible impact with every giving. One example of a creative approach that creates more impacts than what is on the face value is, for example, if you imagine a tree and then you would think planting a tree would be good for the environment and good for the community. But then if you planted this mango tree in a community in Kenya, what it does is that the mango tree will grow up within let's say five years or so to start producing fruit.

If a family has two of these mango trees, then they can sell the fruit to fund the school education costs of a child for an entire year. Why this matters so much is that Kenya suffered from the HIV issue, and so many children actually lost their parents.

There were thousands of orphans in those communities, and instead of sending those children to institutions or orphanages, this organisation realised that it's best to keep the children within their communities. The children can instead stay with relatives or neighbours and grow up where they are.

But the problem is that those families don't have enough income to actually keep those kids and to send them to school, so by actually helping a family plant these fruit trees, they can make sure that they would have enough income to continue to send their children to school.

That kind of transformed many things in those communities just by giving mango trees. Mango trees could cost a few dollars just to plant, but the long-term impact of that is massive. This is just one example of how impactful giving can be.

Those are multiple amazing stories, and as you said, it's very clear the flow on impacts that come out of giving back as you've talked about for this episode. To finish off Masami, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I was thinking about that, and one thing I would highly recommend is for anybody who hasn't watched David Attenborough's latest documentary called A Life On Our Planet.

I think it would be really worthwhile for you to watch it because David Attenborough is one of my heroes for sure, but also, I really get the love that he has for the natural world and for this planet, but this documentary really highlighted the issues that we are facing in a very realistic way.

But at the same time, it gives us hope that we actually can come together to do something about it. This is not a book, but I think it would be something that you would enjoy watching with your family or friends.

That's a great recommendation

Masami, thank you so much for taking the time and sharing your generous insights with us and our listeners.